


coping mechanisms

by quadrille



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Background Female Ryder/Reyes Vidal, Bonding, Coping, Crew as Family, During Canon, Game Spoilers, Gen, Movie Night, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Team Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-29
Updated: 2017-05-29
Packaged: 2018-11-06 12:33:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11036277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quadrille/pseuds/quadrille
Summary: The Milky Way pioneers are 600 years away from home, and with no way back. That sort of thing takes its toll.





	coping mechanisms

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Способы адаптации](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15916743) by [fandom_MassEffect](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fandom_MassEffect/pseuds/fandom_MassEffect), [MilvaBarring](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MilvaBarring/pseuds/MilvaBarring)



> I couldn't help slipping some Reyder in here, but it's short -- the rest is all Tempest crew feels.

For the first time in her life, Ryder develops insomnia.

She finds herself waking up in the middle of the crew’s second shift (there’s no such thing as ‘night’ in space) and roaming the halls: restless, antsy, needing to prowl the confines of their new home. She stops at the Tempest’s viewports to stare out at unfamiliar constellations, stars gathered in new configurations that she never would’ve seen in the Milky Way.

It’s disconcerting. None of the pre-launch psych evals ever properly prepared them for this; they knew, intellectually, that they’d be leaving their old galaxy behind, but you don’t really _know_ it until you’re there. Not until you’re faced with the bone-deep knowledge that you can’t go back, not ever. That world no longer exists.

For all intents and purposes, the Milky Way is dead to you.

(And judging by the recordings in Alec Ryder’s room, maybe it really is gone forever.)

  


* * *

  


Lexi buries herself in her work, as so many of them do — she cares after the rest of the crew more than for herself, serving as makeshift psychiatrist in addition to physician. _Save our souls._

“How are you coping, Ryder?” she asks one day.

“I mean, as well as can be expected? I sort of always pictured my dad and Scott being by my side for this part, though, so that’s… rough.” She doesn’t like talking about this, but for Lexi, she’ll make an exception.

“Have you heard anything more about the condition of his coma?”

“Not yet.” Sitting on the edge of the medical cot, her feet swinging, Ryder is reminded of being a kid again, the Alliance doctors giving her entire family their usual checkups. “It’s still _no news is good news but also still shitty news._ ”

“It must be hard.” Lexi’s hands are tight around her clipboard (one of her totems, Ryder thinks), her back ramrod-straight. The asari is always so careful around her crew; always conscious to not, for example, touch their shoulders in commiseration; always mindful of the professional lines she doesn’t want to cross.

Ryder shrugs. “We have a job to do, which is more important. It’s… whatever, I’ll manage.”

“Just come to me if you ever need anything, however.”

“Actually, there is one thing — do you have any sleeping pills?”

Lexi scribbles some sort of note on the clipboard. “That, I can help with.”

  


* * *

  


When Ryder wanders across the Tempest’s hangar bay, which is wide and empty and echoing, she steps into the storage room ostensibly searching for a midnight snack (although, still, there’s no such thing as ‘night’ in space). She arrives to find Liam half-dozing on the sofa, wrapped in a threadbare blanket. It isn’t Initiative-issued, so he must have brought it with him.

He stirs at the sound of the door unsealing, glances up, and jolts at the sight of Ryder.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she splutters, apologising. “I’m disturbing your peace and quiet, I’ll just let you—” 

“Hey, no worries, it’s nothing.” Liam slides back up to a seated position, his hair crumpled on one side. The light from the TV is pale, the blue washing out his dark skin. At another nod from him, Ryder grabs a box of Blast-Ohs from the shelf and settles on the sofa beside him, drawing her feet up underneath her. She offers him the box, and they start eating handfuls of the cereal dry.

“What were you watching?”

There’s a beat before Liam answers, a little sheepishly. “A post-First Contact romcom.”

She stares at him.

“Don’t knock it, Pathfinder,” he insists. “They’re wild stuff, sociologically. Peace with the turians was a complete breakthrough in the history of human civilisation — it was our first time properly interacting with aliens, figuring them out, figuring out how _they_ worked and how we could work with them. And now we’re at that point again, with the angara. Once things settle down, you bet they’re gonna start making angaran/human romcoms. It’s one of the best ways to get the pulse of a society and its opinions, seeing it through the lens of pop culture. You don’t write this kinda stuff about a people you hate.”

She still stares at him, then laughs and leans back into the cushions. “Alright, Costa. You and your essay have convinced me. Let’s give this a shot.”

Grinning, Liam tosses a Blast-Oh at her and unpauses the vid.

  


* * *

  


Vetra is explaining — also sheepishly — about the hideous lamp she’s trying to track down.

“I didn’t know you were so sentimental,” Ryder remarks in surprise, leaning against one of the walls in the storage room.

“I’m not the only one,” Vetra says. “Suvi has her father’s antique instruments. Cora her asari prayer book. And Liam has... the junk that Liam collects. These things are important. They remind us where we came from.”

Ryder nods quickly, agreeing. “I know what you mean. I never want to forget what I left behind.”

  


* * *

  


Things you don’t realise you’ll miss about planet life until you start living in a tin can in space:

  * Birdsong in the mornings.
  * The taste of rain, or the ozone flavour of thunderstorms in the air.
  * The sound of wind through your window, rather than the ambient hum of the engines.
  * A regular dawn. They can see sunrise and sunset around sixteen times per day, and it’s still a strange sort of beautiful, but it’s just not the same.
  * Long, luxurious showers that aren’t timed to the second, for saving on water consumption.



  


* * *

  


Cora lies on her bunk, legs crossed at the ankle, arm propped behind her head, reading her prayer book. She’s completely absorbed in the text, ignoring the sound of Liam and Jaal chattering by the crew board, or the distant clink of cutlery from the galley.

After a while, she closes her eyes, her breathing levelling out, and it becomes apparent that she’s meditating.

  


* * *

  


Drack disassembles and reassembles his shotgun, over and over and over, cleaning and polishing and checking on every last inch of the weapon. He can do it quickly, automatically, his surprisingly-nimble three-fingered hands moving without thinking.

As Ryder chats to Gil about the latest mods to install on the Nomad, she can hear the repetitive clunk and rattle of Drack disassembling his weaponry, almost like a hypnotic lull. Wash, rinse, repeat.

  


* * *

  


Peebee works on building Zap and Poc.

Unlike Lexi’s meticulous workspace, Peebee’s escape pod-lab-bedroom looks like a tornado’s been through it: there’s paper and hastily-scribbled notes scattered everywhere, covering literally every available surface and most of the floor. There are piles of tools, half-built circuit boards, audio recordings on Remnant tech.

But this sort of coping mechanism seems to be a common trend with the crew (Lexi takes note of this, and makes a decision about offering knitting classes): many of them want to build something with their own two hands, leaving some mark of themselves in this new galaxy. Some proof that they were there. They existed. They Were Here.

If it all goes tits-up, at least there’ll be something to show for it.

  


* * *

  


Other things you miss about the Milky Way:

  * The taste of water that hasn’t been sterilised to hell and back, leaving it strangely tasteless and bland.
  * Dogs.
  * One particular dive bar in the Citadel where you and your twin brother got wasted and took bets on whether the bartender would go home with him or you. You’ll never see that place again, either.
  * Picking apples in an orchard, plucking them straight off the branch with a sharp twist.
  * Clean earth under your feet. Soil. Gardens. Cora watches them flourish in her bedroom, carefully tending the moisture and iron levels for her plants, but it isn’t quite the same.



  


* * *

  


Kallo goes into VR. He can’t take the Tempest through the sort of indulgent loop-the-loops and practice dogfights that he’d like to — it’d put stress on the systems that they don’t need, when fuel and eezo is already so scarce — and so he retreats to the virtual system instead, the lenses obscuring his eyes, long spindly fingers dancing across the controls.

Everyone knows not to disturb him when he’s absorbed in the sim, all of his fast-flying reflexes twitching at a hair-trigger, simultaneously keeping himself sharp but also letting off steam.

He tells Ryder that careful practice makes perfect, and maybe it’ll make the difference someday between them escaping intact or being torn apart by the Scourge, but she knows better: this is his way of dealing, too.

  


* * *

  


Her chin is resting against Reyes’ bare shoulder, his skin radiating heat beneath her splayed palm. The man’s chest rises and falls and his eyes are closed, but she can tell that he isn’t asleep. (She can always read the rhythm of his breathing, noting the moments when that slight coiled tension finally ebbs from his body and he relaxes. The only times he’s ever fully relaxed.)

“Do you ever get overwhelmed?” she asks.

He shifts, cracks open an eye. “By… what? Kadara Port? Being the Charlatan?”

“No, more foundational than that,” Sara says. “Just… by _this._ Andromeda. Andromeda as a whole. Being so far away from home. Doesn’t it ever get to you?”

Reyes seems to be seriously considering the question. “I put it all behind me. I wanted a fresh start, a blank slate. It was a relief to go, honestly.”

He isn’t the only person with that mentality in the Initiative; she’s talked to so many people who left because they were fleeing something, and because they’d prefer the unknown over their dissatisfying lives. Who wanted to leave their old selves behind and find some renewed purpose, which they managed in better or worse degrees of success.

She presses a kiss against his skin.

“But…” he continues, thoughtfully. “It does happen, sometimes. When I remember that I’m on my own. I wasn’t exactly a team player back in Sahrabarik, either—” (She laughs, and he nudges her chidingly.) “—but at the very least I had contacts who had known me more than a year. Who could loan me credits or weaponry, or get me a job when times were tough.”

Sara is quiet for a moment, then adds, “You’re not alone.”

“What?” His hazel eyes are fully open now, glancing at her.

“Reyes, I’m just saying.” A smile. “You’ve got my back at Kadara every step of the way, so I’ve got yours. If you’re honest about what’s going on and you need me, I’m there. No questions asked, no strings or favours to be pulled. And I’m a pretty useful party to have on your side in a conflict, if I may say so myself.”

An unreadable expression flits across his face, but Sara’s gotten better and better at interpreting him, those little flickers that tip his hand. He doesn’t answer, though — simply rolls over and catches her lips in a crushing kiss, his body heavy over hers as her hands tangle in his hair, and this is answer enough.

  


* * *

  


Suvi works in the lab during her downtime — she’s like Lexi in that regard. She has her father’s antique microscope from the early 2000s, where she prepares slides of Andromeda plantlife and presses her eye against the lens to examine the swirls and blobs of colour. Despite the fact that it tells her hardly anything compared to the Initiative’s advanced equipment, where her omni-tool can analyse the lot in a few minutes (and SAM in a few seconds).

She just finds it soothing.

  


* * *

  


Gil keeps taking apart the engine and the drive-core and the plating of the Tempest, to Kallo’s extreme infuriation. Ryder sometimes finds him in the bowels of the ship, buried in the coils and engine parts and tubing and heat sinks, a delicate arrangement of machinery that he keeps gutting.

He finds that meditative, too, just a way to keep his hands busy and not think about the blank space they left behind, 600 years and 2.54 million light years away.

  


* * *

  


After so much goddamned effort, they’re finally watching _Last of the Legion_.

The Pathfinder’s quarters are the only place big enough and comfortable enough in the entire ship to host this movie night, so they have the whole crew jammed onto one sofa, spilling all over each other, Suvi dragging up Ryder’s office-chair to have a seat.

Lexi is deeply unimpressed with all of the plot holes, Kallo picks over the science, and Drack falls asleep on Ryder’s shoulder with some thunderous snoring. She glances over at the heavy weight against her side, bemused.

“Guess he really _is_ an old man,” Peebee pipes up from between the Pathfinder’s feet with a laugh. Lexi puts her finger to her lips, but Ryder shakes her head.

“If he can sleep through all those explosions,” she gestures to the screen, “then I think nothing’s gonna wake him up.”

She settles into it: the chatter, the jokes, the good-natured mockery of the on-screen drama; Jaal perpetually asking questions about turian historical context; Liam perched on the sofa arm and pointing out arcane tidbits about the making-of; Peebee darting over all their outstretched legs to get a drinks refill; Vetra reaching for more graxen.

There’s a comfortable companionability to it all, easing against each other, limbs splayed over limbs. After all these months together, the Tempest crew are finally so wholly and utterly _themselves_ , and at ease for maybe the first time since they blasted into this mess of a galaxy.

But sitting here, in this room, Ryder realises that it’s probably okay.

Because this, right here, with these people — this, finally, feels like home.


End file.
